| The age of cryptocurrency has brought a set of superpowers to the world of online criminal activity—but not the ones you're probably thinking of. In the popular imagination, Bitcoin is still the black marketeer's best friend: a tool whose oldest and clearest utility is in keeping illicit transactions anonymous and untraceable. But a set of forensic techniques developed over the past few years has flipped that equation on its head. Bitcoin has turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto-criminals who have, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty payments. We are living in a "golden age" of cryptocurrency tracing, as one executive at the crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis puts it, an era with a striking asymmetry of power between law enforcement and some of the darkest players on the dark web. In his cover story for WIRED, Andy Greenberg reports on one instance of this asymmetry: between an unlikely set of agents at the IRS and the world's largest network of people trading in images of child sex abuse. These child sexual abuse sites seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain, Greenberg finds. And the IRS agents who trailed their creators and consumers were, in their own way, unready for the levels of depravity they came to face, or the superpowers they had to crack down on them. This is the story of a fast-paced investigation that resulted in hundreds of arrests, all because of the fingerprints suspects left on the blockchain—told with the benefit of unparalleled access and vivid, meticulous, and sensitive reporting. John Gravois | Senior Editor, WIRED | 
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